Fact of the day

Information is the most powerful weapon.

Monday

Fact N°
2203

Optimists die younger.

Researchers for the Longevity Project, which has been conducted continuously since 1921, started off studying 1,500 children and eventually concluded that the most cheerful kids had shorter lives overall than those who were less cheerful. A likely explanation is that cheerful people are more likely to take potentially life-shortening risks. Howard Friedman, the leader of the study's research teams, explained that whimsical optimism "can lead one to be careless about things that are important to health and long life," especially when compared to the lifelong behaviors of someone more cautious and reserved.

Tuesday

Fact N°
2204

Financial risk-taking is just as common in men with low levels of testosterone.

Some risk-taking is associated with high testosterone -- evidenced, for example, by the disproportionately risky behavior shown by men with spiking hormones (particularly those aged 18 to 24). But the likelihood of risk-taking is not necessarily that straightforward according to the authors of a new Duke University study. Testosterone's relationship to risk-taking has a U-shaped, rather than a linear, correlation. The study found that the people likeliest to gamble on a small financial risk were those with either the highest or lowest levels of testosterone for their gender (men and women included).

Wednesday

Fact N°
2205

People who watch more television are less happy overall.

The 30-year General Social Survey concluded that happier people tend to be socially active, and that unhappier people tend to watch TV (the actual act of watching TV was identified as pleasurable and positive in the short term, but correlated with unhappiness in the long term). The contradiction between the short-term and long-term effects of TV could have to do with the way it influences a person's worldview. Before his death in 2005, communications theorist George Gerbner argued that television gives people a false image of the world -- that its sensationalism makes people unconsciously believe, and therefore act, as though the world is worse than it actually is. He called this "Mean World Syndrome."

Thursday

Fact N°
2206

A spammer can potentially make $7,000 to $9,500 a day.

A Berkeley study commandeered part of a botnet that was responsible for a large chunk of the internet's spam and turned it into a research tool. The researchers instructed the infected computers to send out spam that directed people to fake storefronts, which the study then monitored. The researchers netted only 28 "sales" in 26 days -- a 0.00001% conversion rate -- but they'd infiltrated only about 1.5% of the actual botnet. Their final conclusion was that whoever was responsible for the entire botnet could be pulling in $7,000 a day, and $9,500 during active periods, although they stressed that determining actual profit from that figure would be difficult.

Friday

Fact N°
2207

Eating at night contributes disproportionately to weight gain.

An experiment at Ohio State University aimed to emulate humans' late-night TV watching and computer usage by exposing mice to light throughout the restful phase when they typically would have been asleep. Though the mice ate the same amount as the mice who got ordinary sleep, they ate half their food during their now-wakeful rest phase, and summarily gained weight. When their food availability was restricted to their "day" phase only, the mice exposed to the nighttime light lost weight, implying that night eating contributed to weight gain -- even if they'd have eaten the same amount of food over the course of the day anyway.

Saturday

Fact N°
2208

Our opinions of attractiveness are influenced by our peers.

A Harvard study instructed 14 male subjects to rate the attractiveness of 180 women based on photos of their faces. They were shown the series of faces twice, and both times they could see a "peer rating" of the women's attractiveness -- a value picked by the authors of the study, sometimes unduly high and sometimes unduly low. During the second series, the subjects were monitored with fMRI. The second showing revealed that their value judgments weren't influenced by the attractiveness of a face -- they were visibly tied to whether subjects felt they'd been "right" in judging someone attractive or not.

Sunday

Fact N°
2209

A Turkish painter named Esref Armagan can draw in perspective despite having been blind since birth.

Born blind to a poor Turkish family, Armagan has learned not only to paint scenes without assistance, but also to draw objects in three-point perspective -- even though he's never seen the objects themselves, or anything that would give him a frame of reference for perspective drawing. Armagan studied at the University of Toronto and at Harvard, where researchers found that he was making use of his visual cortex while imagining the act of drawing.